Framing Reality’s Ambiguities

The ongoing debate over digital and straight photography is typically waged by two very different sorts of fine arts photographers. On one side are those who favor surrealistic modes of expression and who value the freedom that digital technologies offer. On the other side are those who value the look and feel of direct representation and benefit from the formal restrictions of traditional photographic methods. Because both approaches can create good work, the debate is rarely very productive.

Adam Baer, whose photographs are on view at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography, lends a new dimension to the debate by blurring the lines between digital and “pure” imaging.

If you came across one of Baer’s complicated, collage-like photographs without knowing anything about his technique, you would assume that it was digitally manipulated. These disjointed, surrealistic landscapes have no real-world equivalent, nor do the visual effects seem within the range of traditional methods. In reality, however, Baer is as true to the traditional trade as Ansel Adams or Edward Weston: Each photograph is the result of a single exposure on a single negative, taken from a single painstakingly constructed model.

It is difficult to describe how unbelievable this fact seems in relation to Baer’s most recent work, “Untitled #001” (2000/1), an enormous photograph that incorporates a vertiginous array of competing planes and perspectives and a wholly illogical standard of scale.

In one part of the picture, the viewer looks down from the top of a skyscraper; next to that, two mountain peaks are depicted along a standard horizon line, at eye level. At left is a wooden floor, the angle of which echoes the slope of the peak and perpendicularly bisects the angle of the skyscraper; at right is the interior of a bus, which we view diagonally from above the head of the driver. There are at least four skies visible through the windows of different buildings. The four sets of actors--several bus riders; one man in a skyscraper window; three adults sitting on the roof of a small floating house; a midget and a young girl embracing on the top of the mountain--are all conveyed in radically different scales. It seems impossible to have captured all that confusion in a single shot.

As though in anticipation of such doubts, the Riverside exhibition includes the model from which the photograph was made, sans actors. From most perspectives, the roughly 30-foot-by-30-foot structure looks like an amateurish film set that’s been ripped apart by a strong storm and scattered randomly around the room. When you stand in just the right spot, however, and close one eye to disable your depth perception, the many floating elements fuse miraculously into the picture represented in the photograph. The photographic effects, such as selective blurring, are achieved through a manipulation of the camera’s aperture and focus.

About half a dozen of Baer’s earlier works, all composed by the same method but displayed without the original sets, are included in the exhibition. Although none equals the newest piece in either size or complexity--and a few betray the clumsiness of beginning efforts--most are intriguing pictures that will broaden the viewer’s insight into Baer’s visual sensibility.

Like “Untitled #001,” these are surreal landscapes, distorted by a severe fracturing of space and perspective, with human characters who are caught up in dramas that never quite cohere.

If any element of the work suffers for Baer’s extreme technical precision, it may be the characters. While the strangeness of the landscape supports ambiguity in the narrative, the self-consciousness of the actors’ exaggerated expressions makes them seem too human and familiar to occupy such a world. The effect is distracting.

Implicit in Baer’s rejection of digital methods is an amusingly strident assertion that Photoshop is a lazy alternative to real picture making. Rather than employing such a critique to simply reaffirm the supremacy of traditional photography, however, Baer explores the more important underlying issues of process, intent and artistic agency.

His work calls on viewers to contemplate,in concrete physical terms, how elements of space and perspective function within a photograph, to consider exactly how photographic illusions are constructed and maintained.

In a world filled with objects whose inner mechanics we will never understand but which hold considerable power over our lives nonetheless, such considerations are ever more significant. Baer’s work urges us to look more closely at our world and familiarize ourselves with its schematic underpinnings.

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UC Riverside/California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside, (909) 784-3686, through Oct. 10. Closed Mondays